The Divine Bargain

Long before the Olympians carved their names into history—before heroes, hymns, and myths rose like flames from embers—there were the Primordials.

The first gods. Time. Chaos. Creation itself.

And beneath them lived the first mortals, born into a world still deciding whether humanity was worth saving at all.

Sorcha is one of those mortals. A doeme, a slave bred for obedience—her body is owned, her mind conditioned, her soul treated as currency by men who wear godhood like a crown and believe dominion is their birthright. She was never meant to survive this world. Only to endure it long enough to break. And so she clings to a single truth: Chaos—the god of the void, of endings, of oblivion—is the only force that promises an end to suffering.

But even that end is not hers to claim.

Because when Chronos—the god of the beginning, the middle, and the end, untouched by mercy and unmoved by desire—saw her, something within him shifted. In that moment, he defied the first and greatest law of divinity. To save Sorcha, Chronos makes a forbidden bargain—one soul exchanged for one life. The cost fractures eternity itself. Time warps. The future splinters. And Sorcha becomes bound to a fate she cannot outrun.

And when she finally comes face-to-face with the god who altered creation for her, she learns the most devastating truth of all:

Her life was never truly hers.

This is not a retelling, but a lost myth—of love blooming where it should not, of power bending where it was meant to remain absolute, and of a mortal woman forced to decide whether fate is something to endure or something to defy.